No good options in Iraq

All three presidential contenders were on hand to tout their own Iraq agendas and to question Army Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker when they appeared before the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees yesterday.
But despite sharp questioning and considered responses, there was no clarifying moment likely to convert anyone's views about how to proceed with an Iraq war that has already cost $400 billion and thousands of Iraqi and American lives. For that kind of clarity, at least in terms of framing the issues, a less partisan perspective is needed.
The nonpartisan, congressionally funded United States Institute of Peace came out with just such a report last week. Called "Iraq After the Surge: Options and Questions," it quietly lays out what has and has not been accomplished in Iraq. It also puts forward three different scenarios for moving forward and the pros and cons of each -- from a continued full commitment to a conditional commitment to a pullout.

In terms of whether the troop surge has accomplished its goals, the report shows, as Petraeus did yesterday, that it has been a mixed bag.
Yes, there has been some improvement in security, de-Ba'athification, collection and distribution of oil revenues, and local cooperation. But Iraq remains dangerously fragile. Iraqi troops still are relatively unprepared to shoulder security requirements alone, and there has been little political progress. The recent Iraqi operation against the Shi'a Mahdi Army in Basra was an embarrassment for the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
It's infuriating that so much of the piddling U.S. progress has come in remedying careless miscalculations that the Bush administration made after the fall of Saddam Hussein. It's particularly infuriating -- given that our troops are stretched to capacity and are needed in greater strength in Afghanistan -- that the decision to invade Iraq was made at all.
Still, the question now is where our national interests reside, and the answers to that are murky.
Pull out of Iraq and there is the likelihood of sectarian bloodshed, an entrenchment of the al Qaeda elements that the invasion enabled and further empowerment of Iran and its proxies Hezbollah and, to some degree, Hamas -- the growing strength of which the invasion also enabled. Remain and there is the likelihood that American prestige around the world will continue to decline and the costs in blood and treasure will soar.
Sen. Hillary Clinton came closest yesterday to summing up the reality of the pros and cons of pulling out of Iraq, noting that "if this were easy . . . we could all agree." What the United States is left with is a handful of bad options, one of which may -- or may not -- be less bad than the others.